A24 distributes Charlotte Wells’ feature film debut, a brilliant coming-of-age story through the memory of one last vacation.
With her first feature, Charlotte Wells joins other directors such as Céline Sciamma or Joanna Hogg in her review of the bonds between parents and daughters. It is no longer a matter of claiming that the elderly understand their offspring but of tracing the reverse process, the one in which you come to understand your parents beyond the filial bond. If the aforementioned filmmakers resort to strategies typical of the fantastic to imagine paths of identification with the mother figure, Wells deploys a metafilmic device: the review by the adult protagonist of the home videos of the last vacation with her father.
In a ‘close-up’, ‘Aftersun’ unfolds as a splendid portrait of the sensory and emotional summer experience of an 11-year-old girl with her divorced father (Paul Mescal, the most sensitive actor in Anglophone cinema). But in the background, the figure of a man saying goodbye is drawn, an image that the protagonist is only able to outline years later. A) Yes, Beneath the luminous surface of a summer film, one of the most devastating films of the season is emerging..
To reconnect with those absent parents whom we did not understand at the time
DATA SHEET
Address: charlotte wells Distribution: Paul Mescal, Francesca Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Kayleigh Coleman Country: United Kingdom Year: 2022 Release date: 16–12-2022 Gender: Drama Script: charlotte wells Duration: 98 min.
Synopsis: Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a vacation she took with her father 20 years ago. Real and imagined memories of her fill the spaces between images of her as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she never knew.
Source: Fotogramas
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